Posts by GreyWolf 210 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Jan 2007
There is more to this scandal than meets the eye. Why was there such a drive to deny fault in Horizon, to blame the victims, to cover up what had happened?
I smell a corrupt procurement - just how exactly did ICL Pathway/Fujitsu get selected? Who paid whom off?
Vennells is just the patsy/sacrificial lamb - there is someone else in the shadows.
Quoting "So the downvotes represent comfort with the idea that -any- educational concept should be wrapped around gendered stereotypes (let alone STEM), segregated similarly, and that a teacher who tends to think that girls alone would be drawn to a dollhouse (etc.) is well prepared to welcome and meet a diverse group of learners where their interests intersect with the course material.
Nice. I really had no idea that Reg Readers were such an ignorant and out of touch bunch of idiots."
My dear https://forums.theregister.com/user/74046/, I bow before your superior wisdom, not to mention your superior attitude.
Let's hear your explanation of why girls who enjoy programming and tech at age 7 to 9-ish suddenly lose interest at around 10-11. And do tell us what your actual experience in the matter actually is?
I am describing a known problem in the Coder Dojo movement, that the Raspberry Pi Foundation that sponsors Coder Dojo is very concerned about. At our most recent conference, no-one had a solution.
So, dear Code for Broke, we are all waiting fo you to come down from your mountain and hand us your solution on tablets of stone.
I will not be waiting for you - I will be getting on with trying to do something about it.
Happy to help - do you have a Makerspace/Hackspace/FermiLab/Coder Dojo near you? There you will find people who help you take the next step. And you may enjoy the usual eccentricity of steampunkers, LARPers, stop motion addicts, robot builders, mainframe restorers, and other entertaining loonies.
I mentor at a Coder Dojo. I have spent this year collecting old laptops (remarkably easy to get free donations; remarkably easy to uplift the memory and an SSD).
Out of a dozen machines donated, maybe half were Chromebooks. We put Mint on them and they were immediately useful.
We love the R-Pi, but they take a lot more volunteer time to set up and test before each session, and pack away afterwards. We will probably delay introducing them until the kids are experienced enough to do the setup and test themselves.
Latest acquisition: a doll's house, for teaching girls about electricity and how to install lighting (LEDS; don't panic).
In the 1990s, I had a girlfriend who was a nurse. The health unit that employed her made all the nurses buy their own stethoscopes (not cheap, on a nurse's pay).
When I asked why, she said it was because they kept on being stolen, and management had decided to refuse to pay for replacements.
[DOGMA ALERT] Nor would management arrange proper security for the hospital, because "we have to be open to everybody".
And it wasn't just stethoscopes, lab equipment, emergency oxygen, absolutely everything, all costing hundreds or thousands to replace; it was ALL getting stolen. And the management were doing NOTHING about it.
There used to be an Aunt Sally (alley? course? track? lane?) in the back garden, the only only Aunt Sally I have ever seen (this was 1960s).
[In an Aunt Sally, there are painted heads perched on top of posts, and you throw hard balls the size of tennis balls at the heads to knock them off. I have no idea how scoring worked].
Some owner since vandalised the back garden, tiling it, and putting tables put there, in order to cram in more drinkers.
I would like to see heads painted as current politicians, for us to throw rocks at.
We live near "civilisation" (only 3 miles from BT Adastral Park and a major A-road), but we have little or no mobile phone signal in this village. We are totally dependent on landlines for emergency calls.
We also have regular power cuts.
VOIP is NOT a viable alternative.
Does someone have to die before BT gets a clue?
"terrible environmental impact of the manufacture and replacement of the batteries"
EV batteries are 95% recyclable (the other 5% is plastic), and are already being recycled widely. In the future, old batteries will be a better source for the minerals than mining, thus cheaper than mining.
"sell them into the second-hand market"
What second-hand market? As soon as EVs become available at sensible prices and sensible volumes (hint: the Chinese, this year 2023; see also MG4 at half the price of a Tesla), loads of ICE cars will hit the second-hand market, the bottom will fall out. And will affect all the way up to "nearly new" - no-one will buy a new ICE car when the depreciation is much steeper than today's.
End game: "classic" ICE cars will survive. Boring mass-market cars will get crushed.
City Fibre clearly think they have a right to a guaranteed profit, and want OfCom to make the arrangements. City Fibre, if you are not prepared to do the work to compete, don't expect the profit. [Nota bene: if Openreach and BT are so incompetent, how come it is so hard for City Fibre to beat them easily?]
In other news, City Fibre can't find their arse with both hands. They have laid fibre in our county town, but only in the centre. Half a mile from the Central Square, we have heard nothing but promises (and no action) for three years now. There's a golden harvest just waiting for someone who simply gets on with the job.
Furthermore, they are only interested in the part of UK where the population is densest. Beyond the edge of town, you'll be dead before anyone other than Openreach installs anything.
Quote: "Electric cars create battery waste"
Not true.
Car batteries are 95% recyclable, and recovering the minerals from old batteries is much cheaper than mining them in the first place.
Both Tesla and VW already have recycling factories, and more are on the way.
Also: there are at least two other potential uses for car batteries. They will definitely have a second-hand value, so will not be dumped.
Oh no, not "golden payday".
The Twitter board is desperate to avoid jail time for lying to the SEC all these many years. Because that is an obvious move for Musk, if the Twitter board don't get their house in order.
Moreover, if the advertisers agree that Twitter is not 95% real people, they will start demanding cuts in the advertising rates. And Twitter's (already dismal) income vanishes.
So either they release the data, or go to jail while Twitter itself dries up and blows away, leaving Mush free to build whatever he wants instead. [and maybe he has already built something .... ]
Your very sensible suggestion has one major flaw.
It assumes that there is anyone at the government department that understands the basics of IT.
No. They got rid of all those more than 20 years ago. And have been spreading their legs and dropping their knickers for the suppliers ever since.
I left in a much earlier clear out.
I had been telling my favourite customer what I expected my daily rate to be - about one-third of what IBM had been billing for me.
He replied "How the hell does IBM think they will be able to do business in future?".
In my experience, becoming a self-employed consultant transformed the experience to the point where I no longer needed to leave the industry.
1. I earned much more
2. That gave me a six-month money buffer, so I could just walk if it got intolerable. That made it all easier to bear. And there ARE good customers out there; no need to tolerate the crappy ones.
3. I had a built-in excuse for not tolerating bullshit ("it's costing you £X per day, are you sure it's value for money?". Nobody expected me at team meetings (unless there were doughnuts).
4. I'm in charge. I chose how many days a year I worked. I could and did take a lot more time off for fun stuff.
Yes, I realise that HMRC has completely changed the deal since my time (I retired when it got oppressive). But I suspect there are cracks to wriggle through, if you and your customer are creative.
Perhaps written by new graduates from a non-Western university where the teaching materials have not been updated in two decades.
Plus: I have to mention my personal hobby horse. Usability.
Too many developers think usability is a matter of taste and style, which only they can possibly comprehend.
Nope; usability can be measured (time to complete a task; number of errors/restarts over a series of tasks).
I have seen this happen so many times in building societies, banks, insurance companies, etc etc etc.
You face an impossible dilemma - do you (1) rewrite it all simultaneously (boil the ocean) or (2) write something new and feed it from the old (where none of the data is compatible*) or (3) buy a software solution from USA? All routes lead to disaster.
* Incompatibility: what you mortgage is not what you insure, and ne'er the twain shall meet. None of the data fields match.
The companies I saw trying to solve this riddle screwed themselves up, are now merely brand names, and no longer exist in any form.
Except for one, which is going to solve the problem by getting rid of not just the software, but also the entire product range and all the customers, 26 million of us here in UK are going to be just dumped. And left without an emergency service.
"here's me thinking that munging data from one form to another was what programmers did."
That only works when the item represented is the same thing in both cases.
There are lots of instances where it's only the Hoomans that use the same word for two different data objects.
I worked for a building society where the "house" that you had a mortgage on was not the same object as the "house" you had an insurance on.
"Yes, but only good until Oct 2025 unless you are going to run another OS."
Why yes, yes we are.
Linux will run just fine on second-hand business hardware.
And this is at HALF the price of new flimsy consumer blingy shiney.
Down here in the weeds, we are looking forward to the flood of cheap goodies...
Same experience, but in Sweden. At home in UK I couldn't get lost; I had some kind of built-in awareness of direction and time.
But in Sweden the sun was in the wrong place in the sky, and I was always disoriented, until a few years in when I got used to it.
Then I moved back home, and was disoriented all over again.
Charts need updating, because the land masses are not the only things on the chart. Lighthouses come and go (mostly go), wind farms get built, Traffic Separation Schemes get altered, sandbanks move, sea marks (buoys and beacons) get new light characteristics (important at night), and many more things.
With manual updating, these changes are written onto the actual physical chart, and number and date of the change are written in the bottom left margin.
A warship with physical charts would have thousands of charts on board, all of which need updating by an officer (usually junior). If the captain wants to get any other work out of that officer .... some of the updating will get delayed ... which causes a panic when the ship gets redeployed to another theatre.
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